Hilary Howes
Biographic Data
| ID | 227592 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Hilary Howes |
| GIVEN NAMES | Hilary |
| FAMILY NAME | Howes |
| SIGNATURE | HOWES H |
| AFFILIATIONS | Australian National University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-4437-7884 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 27 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 8 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 27 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1980 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Ancient apocalypse now: Lessons from pseudoscience in the Pacific in the face of GenAI
Generative AI (GenAI) and misinformation online have the potential to cause harm to Indigenous cultural knowledge advancement and truth-telling endeavours. Indigenous archaeologies in Australia and the Pacific Islands are no strangers to misinformation produced from pseudoarchaeology or fringe narratives; however, the new potential threats posed by GenAI in (re)popularising false histories and the loss of scientific and Indigenous authority are o…
“A loss of journey”: Reasons for seeking the repatriation of First Nations Australian Ancestral Remains
The repatriation of First Nations Australian Ancestral Remains has a much longer history than is often realized. From the early decades of the 1800s onwards, European visitors and settlers documented First Nations Australians attempting to resist the removal of Ancestral Remains. By the 1970s, First Nations Australian communities had enough political agency within Australian society to mount organised campaigns against further disturbances of gra…
The Ethics of Casts: Plaster Casts of Skulls, Faces and Bodies from Colonial Australia
In early 2022, the Australian Government committed to establish a National Resting Place to care for the remains of First Nations Australians that cannot be returned to their communities of origin. Scoping studies have identified plaster casts of skulls and skeletal elements, as well as casts taken from the bodies and faces of living individuals, among the kinds of Ancestral Remains likely to be held in a National Resting Place. At the same time,…
Entangled Histories: Ethnology, Archaeology and Physical Anthropology in Oceania
The discipline of ethnology, now more commonly known as social and cultural anthropology, developed from a variety of research fields. Although the establishment of ‘four-field anthropology’ is generally attributed to Franz Boas in 1904, it was already common in the second half of the nineteenth century for traveller-naturalists, missionaries and colonial authorities who were actively involved in ethnology to engage in other disciplines at the sa…
Remembrance of Pacific Pasts
imperial factor' as an explanatory concept and the need to devise 'methods for the study of multicultural situations'and the value of ethnohistorical evidence for the study of Polynesian history respectively. 2Contributions to subsequent issues addressed a wide variety of approaches and methodologies, facilitated from 1985 by the introduction of a 'Comment' section explicitly 'designed as a forum for debate about historical matters raised in this…
Pacific royalty, past and present: German interactions with pre-existing elites on Pohnpei
The island of Pohnpei houses the ruins of Nan Madol, currently Micronesia’s only World Heritage site. It is now believed to represent the ceremonial centre of the Saudeleur dynasty, a vibrant period in Pacific Island culture. Western visitors to Pohnpei in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were fascinated by these ruins, often interpreting them as the dwelling place of kings long past. At the same time, they sought to comprehend t…
Aspects of the historiography of Australian archaeology
This article is a historiography, or critical review of the history, of Australian archaeology. It commences with a discussion of the two major regional histories of Australian archaeology, and a survey of the literature on the removal and scientific use of human remains. This is followed by an examination of the two major approaches to the history of Australian archaeology—individual and collective biography, and the use of specific archaeologic…
Die Bürde des Weißen Zaren: Russische Vorstellungen einer imperialen Zivilisierungsmission in Zentralasien by Ulrich Hofmeister
A review of Ulrich Hofmeister's 2019 monograph 'Die Buerde des Weissen Zaren: Russische Vorstellungen einer imperialien Zivilisierungsmission in Zentralasien' (English translation of the title: 'The White Tsar's Burden: Russian Ideas of an Imperial Civilizing Mission in Central Asia'). Hofmeister interrogates 'Russian-language debates about Central Asia' (present-day southern Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Turkmenistan) from t…
Douglas Grant and Rudolf Marcuse: Wartime encounters at the edge of art
In 1918, in a German POW camp, German Jewish sculptor Rudolf Marcuse modelled a bronze bust of Australian Indigenous serviceman Douglas Grant. We discuss these two men’s life-histories, the political impetus for creating racialized images of POWs, the early twentieth-century globalization of colonial power structures, and the capacity of a personal, arbitrary encounter to resist simple, deterministic imperatives
Lothar Becker’s contributions to anthropology
Warning Readers of this article are warned that it may contain terms, descriptions and opinions that are culturally sensitive and/or offensive to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders. Silesian traveller-naturalist Lothar Becker’s two visits to Victoria in 1849–52 and 1855–65 brought him into contact with Aboriginal people living in Western Victoria, Melbourne, the Murray River at Albury, and Gippsland. His travels took him to areas now recognis…
Lapita before Lapita: The Early Story of the Meyer/O’Reilly Watom Island Archaeological Collection
Seventeen years before the first excavation at the archaeological site of Lapita (New Caledonia) in 1952, two men of the cloth met and exchanged artefacts, notes and ideas to produce some of the earliest analyses of what later became known as Lapita pottery. Otto Meyer (1877–1937), a Sacred Heart Missionary stationed on Watom Island, described chance finds of ‘prehistoric pottery’ in 1909, following these with more systematic excavations. Patrick…
Origins of Archaeology in the Pacific: The Emergence and Application of Archaeological Field Techniques
When was archaeology first practised in the Pacific as a distinct discipline – that is, following a prescribed set of field methods to investigate human change over time, different from those used for other areas such as ethnology, geology, or linguistics? Did Pacific archaeology develop as the application of a metropolitan model, or did it evolve in situ, progressing in fits and starts and communicated only sporadically? We approach these questi…
Tautai
Biography, Barbara Caine suggests, has much to offer history. It can give us ‘insight [...] into the lives and thought of significant individuals’ or those of ‘less-exalted and ordinary people’.It can also illuminate ‘the ways in which particular institutions and events and larger-scale social, economic and political developments were felt, understood and experienced by those who lived through them’.1 These benefits are true of Indigenous and non…
Writing the History of Archaeology in the Pacific: Voices and Perspectives
In histories of world archaeology to date the Pacific is all but missing. There has been some investigation into the history of archaeology in Australia and New Zealand, and other piecemeal work focusing on single countries or biographies of individuals, but much remains to be done. We offer a critical overview of general literature on the history of archaeology in the Pacific and stress the potential for a deeper knowledge of archaeology's histo…
Racial Science and Human Diversity in Colonial Indonesia, written by Fenneke Sysling
Early German-language Analyses of Potsherds from New Guinea and the Bismarck Archipelago
In December 1905, the Austrian anthropologist and medical practitioner Rudolf Pöch unearthed a number of potsherds from a refuse heap in Wanigela, south-eastern New Guinea. Four years later, Otto Meyer, a German Catholic missionary, discovered decorated pottery fragments on Watom Island in the Bismarck Archipelago. His illustrated accounts of these fragments are now recognised as the earliest descriptions of Lapita pottery. Although Meyer and Pöc…
Germany in the Pacific: Were the Germans before the Rise of National Socialism Racists? A Comment on the December 2007 Issue of The Journal of Pacific History
Germany in the Pacific: Were the Germans before the Rise of National Socialism Racists? A Comment on the December 2007 Issue of The Journal of Pacific History." The Journal of Pacific History, 52(1), pp. 122–123
Tropenliebe: Schweizer Naturforscher und niederländischer Imperialismus in Südostasien um 1900
"Tropenliebe: Schweizer Naturforscher und niederländischer Imperialismus in Südostasien um 1900." The Journal of Pacific History, 51(3), pp. 348–349
À propos de cent trente-cinq crânes de Papous: A. B. Meyer et la controverse autour de la craniologie
Cet article analyse les publications d’Adolf Bernhard Meyer, voyageur et naturaliste allemand (1840-1911), au sujet de sa collection de cent trente-cinq crânes du nord-ouest de la Nouvelle-Guinée. J’y questionne les procédés par lesquels Meyer s’est efforcé de produire un savoir racial à partir de ce qu’il appelait le « matériau brut » ; l’importance du travail de terrain dans ses prétentions à une vérité scientifique ; les effets des différences…
Kolonialismus in Ozeanien
Zehn Jahre auf den Inseln der Südsee 1887–1897: Aus dem Tagebuch der Paula David. Ten Years in the Islands of the South Seas 1887–1897: from the diary of Paula David. Edited by Schlossmuseum Sondersha…
Intimate Strangers: Friendship, exchange and Pacific encounters. By Vanessa Smith
Shrieking Savages’ and ‘Men of Milder Customs’: Dr Adolf Bernhard Meyer in New Guinea, 1873
Adolf Bernhard Meyer (1840–1911), a German-Jewish medical scientist, naturalist and museum director, travelled and collected in northwest New Guinea between March and July 1873. He was one of the first German-born naturalists to visit New Guinea and the first to publish extensively in German on his field experiences there. Though his subsequent career as a museum director was built on the scientific results and collections from this expedition, a…
The race question in Oceania: A. B. Meyer and Otto Finsch between metropolitan theory and field experience, 1865-1914
This thesis examines the written, visual and material records produced by two late nineteenth-century German traveller-naturalists in Oceania, Adolf Bernhard Meyer (1840-1911) and Otto Finsch (1839-1917). I probe these records for traces of Indigenous agency and discuss the impacts of their authors' personal encounters with actual Oceanian people on their understandings of human difference, locating this discussion within the context of racial sc…
Oceanic Encounters: Exchange, desire, violence. Edited by Margaret Jolly, Serge Tcherkézoff and Darrell Tryon
Oceanic Encounters: exchange, desire, violence. Edited by Margaret Jolly, Serge Tcherkezoff and Darrell Tryon. Canberra, ANU E Press, 2009. xx+344 pp., illus., endnotes, bibliog., index. Print vers
Aspects of the historiography of Australian archaeology
This article is a historiography, or critical review of the history, of Australian archaeology. It commences with a discussion of the two major regional histories of Australian archaeology, and a survey of the literature on the removal and scientific use of human remains. This is followed by an examination of the two major approaches to the history of Australian archaeology—individual and collective biography, and the use of specific archaeologic…
Shrieking Savages’ and ‘Men of Milder Customs’: Dr Adolf Bernhard Meyer in New Guinea, 1873
Adolf Bernhard Meyer (1840–1911), a German-Jewish medical scientist, naturalist and museum director, travelled and collected in northwest New Guinea between March and July 1873. He was one of the first German-born naturalists to visit New Guinea and the first to publish extensively in German on his field experiences there. Though his subsequent career as a museum director was built on the scientific results and collections from this expedition, a…
Origins of Archaeology in the Pacific: The Emergence and Application of Archaeological Field Techniques
When was archaeology first practised in the Pacific as a distinct discipline – that is, following a prescribed set of field methods to investigate human change over time, different from those used for other areas such as ethnology, geology, or linguistics? Did Pacific archaeology develop as the application of a metropolitan model, or did it evolve in situ, progressing in fits and starts and communicated only sporadically? We approach these questi…
Oceanic Encounters: Exchange, desire, violence. Edited by Margaret Jolly, Serge Tcherkézoff and Darrell Tryon
Oceanic Encounters: exchange, desire, violence. Edited by Margaret Jolly, Serge Tcherkezoff and Darrell Tryon. Canberra, ANU E Press, 2009. xx+344 pp., illus., endnotes, bibliog., index. Print vers
Preserving the Windmills of East Anglia
East Anglia is the region that had more windmills than any other part of the country. Yet such is the catalogue of disasters which have overtaken them that it is amazing that any have survived at all. Representative examples have, however, been painstakingly restored. This paper reviews the current position in the region. It looks at a large number of mills in order to illustrate the many different problems in windmill restoration. Excellent work…
The Spectre at the Feast: The Emergence of Salt in Victoria's Irrigated Districts
Salinity in Victoria's irrigated districts can be understood as the result not only of environmental predisposition and technological inadequacies, but of a prevailing political philosophy which considered irrigation as a social and economic good per se. Victorian authorities (governments and water institutions), anxious to secure the state's economic prosperity and to encourage the establishment of independent family smallholdings, tended to und…
The race question in Oceania: A. B. Meyer and Otto Finsch between metropolitan theory and field experience, 1865-1914
This thesis examines the written, visual and material records produced by two late nineteenth-century German traveller-naturalists in Oceania, Adolf Bernhard Meyer (1840-1911) and Otto Finsch (1839-1917). I probe these records for traces of Indigenous agency and discuss the impacts of their authors' personal encounters with actual Oceanian people on their understandings of human difference, locating this discussion within the context of racial sc…
Oceanic Encounters: Exchange, desire, violence. Edited by Margaret Jolly, Serge Tcherkézoff and Darrell Tryon
Oceanic Encounters: exchange, desire, violence. Edited by Margaret Jolly, Serge Tcherkezoff and Darrell Tryon. Canberra, ANU E Press, 2009. xx+344 pp., illus., endnotes, bibliog., index. Print vers
Zehn Jahre auf den Inseln der Südsee 1887–1897: Aus dem Tagebuch der Paula David. Ten Years in the Islands of the South Seas 1887–1897: from the diary of Paula David. Edited by Schlossmuseum Sondersha…
Intimate Strangers: Friendship, exchange and Pacific encounters. By Vanessa Smith
Shrieking Savages’ and ‘Men of Milder Customs’: Dr Adolf Bernhard Meyer in New Guinea, 1873
Adolf Bernhard Meyer (1840–1911), a German-Jewish medical scientist, naturalist and museum director, travelled and collected in northwest New Guinea between March and July 1873. He was one of the first German-born naturalists to visit New Guinea and the first to publish extensively in German on his field experiences there. Though his subsequent career as a museum director was built on the scientific results and collections from this expedition, a…
Kolonialismus in Ozeanien
À propos de cent trente-cinq crânes de Papous: A. B. Meyer et la controverse autour de la craniologie
Cet article analyse les publications d’Adolf Bernhard Meyer, voyageur et naturaliste allemand (1840-1911), au sujet de sa collection de cent trente-cinq crânes du nord-ouest de la Nouvelle-Guinée. J’y questionne les procédés par lesquels Meyer s’est efforcé de produire un savoir racial à partir de ce qu’il appelait le « matériau brut » ; l’importance du travail de terrain dans ses prétentions à une vérité scientifique ; les effets des différences…
Tropenliebe: Schweizer Naturforscher und niederländischer Imperialismus in Südostasien um 1900
"Tropenliebe: Schweizer Naturforscher und niederländischer Imperialismus in Südostasien um 1900." The Journal of Pacific History, 51(3), pp. 348–349
Racial Science and Human Diversity in Colonial Indonesia, written by Fenneke Sysling
Early German-language Analyses of Potsherds from New Guinea and the Bismarck Archipelago
In December 1905, the Austrian anthropologist and medical practitioner Rudolf Pöch unearthed a number of potsherds from a refuse heap in Wanigela, south-eastern New Guinea. Four years later, Otto Meyer, a German Catholic missionary, discovered decorated pottery fragments on Watom Island in the Bismarck Archipelago. His illustrated accounts of these fragments are now recognised as the earliest descriptions of Lapita pottery. Although Meyer and Pöc…
Germany in the Pacific: Were the Germans before the Rise of National Socialism Racists? A Comment on the December 2007 Issue of The Journal of Pacific History
Germany in the Pacific: Were the Germans before the Rise of National Socialism Racists? A Comment on the December 2007 Issue of The Journal of Pacific History." The Journal of Pacific History, 52(1), pp. 122–123
Douglas Grant and Rudolf Marcuse: Wartime encounters at the edge of art
In 1918, in a German POW camp, German Jewish sculptor Rudolf Marcuse modelled a bronze bust of Australian Indigenous serviceman Douglas Grant. We discuss these two men’s life-histories, the political impetus for creating racialized images of POWs, the early twentieth-century globalization of colonial power structures, and the capacity of a personal, arbitrary encounter to resist simple, deterministic imperatives
Lothar Becker’s contributions to anthropology
Warning Readers of this article are warned that it may contain terms, descriptions and opinions that are culturally sensitive and/or offensive to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders. Silesian traveller-naturalist Lothar Becker’s two visits to Victoria in 1849–52 and 1855–65 brought him into contact with Aboriginal people living in Western Victoria, Melbourne, the Murray River at Albury, and Gippsland. His travels took him to areas now recognis…
Lapita before Lapita: The Early Story of the Meyer/O’Reilly Watom Island Archaeological Collection
Seventeen years before the first excavation at the archaeological site of Lapita (New Caledonia) in 1952, two men of the cloth met and exchanged artefacts, notes and ideas to produce some of the earliest analyses of what later became known as Lapita pottery. Otto Meyer (1877–1937), a Sacred Heart Missionary stationed on Watom Island, described chance finds of ‘prehistoric pottery’ in 1909, following these with more systematic excavations. Patrick…
Origins of Archaeology in the Pacific: The Emergence and Application of Archaeological Field Techniques
When was archaeology first practised in the Pacific as a distinct discipline – that is, following a prescribed set of field methods to investigate human change over time, different from those used for other areas such as ethnology, geology, or linguistics? Did Pacific archaeology develop as the application of a metropolitan model, or did it evolve in situ, progressing in fits and starts and communicated only sporadically? We approach these questi…
Tautai
Biography, Barbara Caine suggests, has much to offer history. It can give us ‘insight [...] into the lives and thought of significant individuals’ or those of ‘less-exalted and ordinary people’.It can also illuminate ‘the ways in which particular institutions and events and larger-scale social, economic and political developments were felt, understood and experienced by those who lived through them’.1 These benefits are true of Indigenous and non…
Writing the History of Archaeology in the Pacific: Voices and Perspectives
In histories of world archaeology to date the Pacific is all but missing. There has been some investigation into the history of archaeology in Australia and New Zealand, and other piecemeal work focusing on single countries or biographies of individuals, but much remains to be done. We offer a critical overview of general literature on the history of archaeology in the Pacific and stress the potential for a deeper knowledge of archaeology's histo…
Die Bürde des Weißen Zaren: Russische Vorstellungen einer imperialen Zivilisierungsmission in Zentralasien by Ulrich Hofmeister
A review of Ulrich Hofmeister's 2019 monograph 'Die Buerde des Weissen Zaren: Russische Vorstellungen einer imperialien Zivilisierungsmission in Zentralasien' (English translation of the title: 'The White Tsar's Burden: Russian Ideas of an Imperial Civilizing Mission in Central Asia'). Hofmeister interrogates 'Russian-language debates about Central Asia' (present-day southern Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Turkmenistan) from t…
Pacific royalty, past and present: German interactions with pre-existing elites on Pohnpei
The island of Pohnpei houses the ruins of Nan Madol, currently Micronesia’s only World Heritage site. It is now believed to represent the ceremonial centre of the Saudeleur dynasty, a vibrant period in Pacific Island culture. Western visitors to Pohnpei in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were fascinated by these ruins, often interpreting them as the dwelling place of kings long past. At the same time, they sought to comprehend t…
Aspects of the historiography of Australian archaeology
This article is a historiography, or critical review of the history, of Australian archaeology. It commences with a discussion of the two major regional histories of Australian archaeology, and a survey of the literature on the removal and scientific use of human remains. This is followed by an examination of the two major approaches to the history of Australian archaeology—individual and collective biography, and the use of specific archaeologic…
Entangled Histories: Ethnology, Archaeology and Physical Anthropology in Oceania
The discipline of ethnology, now more commonly known as social and cultural anthropology, developed from a variety of research fields. Although the establishment of ‘four-field anthropology’ is generally attributed to Franz Boas in 1904, it was already common in the second half of the nineteenth century for traveller-naturalists, missionaries and colonial authorities who were actively involved in ethnology to engage in other disciplines at the sa…
Remembrance of Pacific Pasts
imperial factor' as an explanatory concept and the need to devise 'methods for the study of multicultural situations'and the value of ethnohistorical evidence for the study of Polynesian history respectively. 2Contributions to subsequent issues addressed a wide variety of approaches and methodologies, facilitated from 1985 by the introduction of a 'Comment' section explicitly 'designed as a forum for debate about historical matters raised in this…
The Ethics of Casts: Plaster Casts of Skulls, Faces and Bodies from Colonial Australia
In early 2022, the Australian Government committed to establish a National Resting Place to care for the remains of First Nations Australians that cannot be returned to their communities of origin. Scoping studies have identified plaster casts of skulls and skeletal elements, as well as casts taken from the bodies and faces of living individuals, among the kinds of Ancestral Remains likely to be held in a National Resting Place. At the same time,…
History (17 works) · Archaeology (13 works) · Pacific and Southeast Asian Studies (12 works) · Sociology (9 works) · Political science (8 works) · Anthropology (7 works) · Philosophy (7 works) · Australian Indigenous Culture and History (6 works) · Ethnology (5 works) · Geography (5 works)